For the last couple of days, David Mamet’s advice to writers on The Unit has been bounced approvingly around writers’ blogs (I refuse to use the absurd appellation ‘Scribosphere’ – it makes writers sound like 22nd-century content production droids, memeing out ultragigs of infotasms and authotainment from the factory pods floating in their translucent scribosphere).

In it he gives fairly standard advice in a typical pithy fashion. He also gets in a few good swipes at the ‘blue-suited penguins’ who are in charge of developing new television shows.

(This is actually true. John Birt introduced a flock of emperor penguins into middle management at the BBC as part of a round of ‘efficiency savings’ in 1996. They quickly began to roost in the East Tower, leading to an unfortunate incident in which Ronnie Corbett was placed on a penguin’s feet, and sheltered from the cold weather for eight months until he had matured enough to survive on his own. This is why they are trying to sell TV Centre now. It is infested with penguins. Infested.)

Anyway, Mamet’s advice is good and well-expressed, and well worth a look if you’re interested in writing good drama. It contains things like this:

QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TOOVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC,ACUTE GOAL.

SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

The best thing is that it’s all in CAPS LOCK, so it’s like he’s brought you into his office to TEAR YOU A NEW ASSHOLE, while at the same time distributing writing tips.

However, I’ve begun to suspect that that advice is very helpful if you’re writing drama, but not so helpful if you’re writing something else. Like comedy.

Earlier in the month I was working on a screenplay, and came to a scene that I loved. It was really, really funny. However, it didn’t really move the story on, didn’t tell us much about the characters that we didn’t know already, and was more of a comment about the drama that had already happened than being dramatic in its own right. So I pulled it out.

And the sequence was less funny as a result.

So now I’ve begun to think if maybe, as comedy writers, we don’t have a duty that trumps the need to write good, solid dramatic scenes. The duty to write funny things. Maybe people come to a comedy to be made to laugh, rather than to be compelled to watch every thrilling scene.

Try applying Mamet’s advice above to The Goon Show, or Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Although they do nominally have dramatic through-lines, the dramatic structure is an excuse to go and play with whatever they find funny.

This Is Spinal Tap has a weak move into its final act (Nigel Tufnell just turns up, there’s nothing that dramatically impels him to rejoin the band). In Four Weddings And A Funeral it isn’t clear if Andi MacDowell has any needs, dramatic or otherwise, as her character is just to wander mysteriously in and out of the script as needed. What does Borat need?

Comedies are allowed to break the rules because they have one, higher rule: Be funny. As long as they fulfil that one we’ll forgive a lot.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to be gleaned from Mamet’s advice. A lot of comedy comes direct from the frustration of a character’s wants, needs, and desires, and the lengths to which we, as writers, will go to frustrate them. But we should also accept that there are other ways of getting laughs: silliness, visual jokes, musical numbers, and that the highest purpose of a comedy is to make people laugh.

(You’ll have to excuse all of the pompous talk of the ‘duty’ or ‘purpose’ of a writer. It consists, in my case, of sitting in a shed thinking up knob gags, so it’s nice to think of it as a little more noble than it might appear at first.)

I may be becoming unconscionably relaxed. I can see it in the In The Gloamings. In the first, Dead Skinny, we went through it at the script stage, and then in the edit, and took out everything that didn’t move the narrative along, no matter how funny I thought it was. The outtakes from that one are lovely.

By the time we reached this month’s A Grave Mistake, however, I was writing much simpler stories with more time to play, and leaving things in that were only there because they were funny. They may well be an unnecessary 10 seconds dramatically, but they make me laugh. And that’s what it’s meant to do. There is one two-second outtake from that one.

In the past I was the king of prick who demanded that each scene justify itself dramatically. In the past, I was that Mamet-y glans.

Comedies are frequently held to a lower standard for logic, although you can’t bend motivation TOO far if the comedy is driven by character traits (which it usually is). I suppose one of the things you’re saying is that comedies can afford to be flabbier and less efficient in getting from A to B, because meandering journeys are often the very essence of comedy, whereas we tolerate them less in straight drama.

I think there’s a wider question of the moves that are considered legal/plausible or illegal/implausible in a story. I sometimes encounter an argument that if your story is set in a world that deviates clearly from our own in some marked fashion, you have greater latitude with the plot moves you can make within the story. I don’t think this is generally true. Everyone is allowed huge latitude for establishing the premise of the story (“What if we lived in a world where everyone forgot the most important event of the previous day?” “Imagine that Chiang Kai-Shek had stayed in power in 1949.”) But this is really the only major move they are allowed to make concerning the unusual or the unlikely. You can’t ask us to imagine that an alien from Krypton crash-lands on earth with startling super-human powers, and then also ask us to to accept later on in the story that he happens to win the lottery as a major plot point.

Some stories also appear to be an excuse for a series of set-pieces or sketches, the plot itself being largely unimportant. Borat is a good example of this, but most Bond movies also fall into this category. If an audience had never seen a Bond movie before and were assessing one as a conventional action drama, they would probably be seriously dissatisfied by its lack of narrative coherence and character arcs. But we bring a different set of expectations to those films.

I find Bond films very difficult to watch, perhaps because no one ever explained the rules to me (that we were essentially watching an excuse for various set-pieces). I was absolutely baffled by one in which, instead of pursuing the diamond (or diamond smugglers) that we had been told was the point of his mission, he ended up on a Caribbean beach instead. I’m always left muttering “But what about the thing? The thing that he was doing? What does this have to do with anything? We were told he was meant to be finding the thing, but instead he’s following a lady!”

I found the one with Jonathan Pryce in so confusing that I actually fell asleep in the cinema whilst trying to watch it…